Florida’s Oceanfront Cities Are Not Prepared for Sea Level Rise On Thursday, a 12-story beachside condo building just north of Miami Beach collapsed, killing at least four people with almost 160 still missing. It could be a scary sign for the future, particularly as sea level rise undermines the very foundation that South Florida sits on. Long before the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside crashed, the building started sinking. An April 2020 study found that the area showed signs of land subsidence—sinking brought on by natural occurrences like sinkholes and exacerbated by human activities like extracting fossil fuels and groundwater. The study’s authors told USA Today that back in the 1990s, the building was descending at a rate of 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) per year, though it’s not clear that that necessarily contributed to its horrific collapse. Officials are just beginning their investigation into what caused the building’s devastating crash. It will take more data to suss out what happened and the role, if any, subsidence played. “At this point, any hypothesis is not more than a simple speculation,” Henry O. Briceño, a professor at Florida International University who studies water quality and geology, wrote in an email. “We should wait for the engineers to collect and analyze the information.” But though the specifics of the crash are still under investigation, it’s been clear for decades that sea level rise and subsidence threaten infrastructure—and people—in South Florida. And the time to address those risks is now, particularly with what the next few decades hold for the region. Sea level rise is expected to accelerate. A report released last year found that Miami “faces the largest risk of any major coastal city in the world” because of the sheer amount of expensive real estate and people living in such a fragile place. An estimated $3.5 trillion of real estate is at risk of inundation by the 2070s, according to the report. Those buildings, though, are ill-equipped for rising seas. “While it is too early to determine the cause, it is definitely not too early to worry about how building and other infrastructure will be impacted as the flooding from sea-level rise worsens, and whether there is a plan to modify and sustain these buildings or whether they should ultimately be abandoned and removed,” Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist at the University of Madison Wisconsin and former associate professor of geology at the University of Florida, wrote in an email. Buildings in Surfside and Miami Beach are constructed atop reclaimed wetland. Underpinning them is porous limestone, which forms the region’s geological base. As rising seas encroach on the area—whether from storm surge or increasingly common sunny day floods—brackish, corrosive groundwater can get pushed up through the limestone, causing problems for structures. “If seawater penetrates a column and reaches the rebar, it will oxidize and the products would increase the volume, creating stresses which in turn could crack the concrete,” said Briceño, noting inspectors probing the Surfside collapse “will have to check if something like that happened.” Whether or not these factors were a factor, though, they could certainly threaten infrastructure in the future. “Structures will be subjected to conditions for which they were not designed, like being under seawater permanently,” said Briceño. “Concrete mixes are prepared for what they are supposed to withstand according to design, both, mechanically and chemically.” Tragically, the Champlain tower was due for a 40-year inspection soon, which could have shown it was at risk of falling in. With such dire threats afoot, officials may have to consider holding such inspections more often. Dutton feared it may even be time to start moving people and infrastructure out of Surfside altogether, a fate that some areas are also already considering due to rising seas. “One of my concerns is that urban hardscape will become flooded without a plan to remove such infrastructure, and then our coastlines will just become a pile of concrete, metal, and glass rubble,” she said. Florida’s Oceanfront Cities Are Not Prepared for Sea Level Rise (msn.com) https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/condo-collapse-miami-surfside-florida-engineer-warning-1.6081682 ---------- wrbtrader
The fack this has to do with sea-level rise. This has to do with the fact that Florida is all limestone. It has no true bedrock. (For those who do not recall what limestone is, it is a sedimentary rock that dissolves when exposed to moisture. And Florida gets a shit-ton of rain every year.) At least when the ice caps melt, Manhattan will survive, because it's bedrock is Manhattan schist.
Unfortunately, I have no knowledge about problems building large buildings or large condos on limestone versus bedrock. I do know enough that buildings exposed to moisture (seawater) are at higher risk of concrete cracking than those buildings not exposed to seawater. wrbtrader
Maybe the inspections in Manhattan are much better ? The Twin Towers were in Manhattan and people (conspiracy theorists) still say today that terrorists crashing airplanes into the building should not have taken down the Twin Towers. Regardless, I wouldn't be surprise to hear about a lot of Condos For Sale signs on other multifloor condos in Surfside, Florida for the remainder of the year. wrbtrader
Unless we find out it was a bomb or small Cessna filled with fuel that hit the FL condo building I guess. If that turns out to be true, no reason to sell yer condo! Just keep the terrorists away! P.S. If anyone around here is astute, they will know what "sinkholes" are. Limestone for teh win!
And I mean this with all respect... but neither of you understand anything here. Write this down.... ....concrete floats. There's not an engineer (PE) or architect in the world that doesn't know this. You guys are going on about stuff that was hashed out 50 years prior to 1980. Concrete floats. This building was designed with that in mind. Trust me. I don't know what happened. A sinkhole maybe? I dunno. But it was NOT osmotic pressure.
Wait 'til cons learn what decreased PH levels from carbonic acid in the ocean due to increased anthropogenic CO2 does to limestone.
What they should have done is evacuate people living in those condos if they were going to do some work on it. Chances are good, they weakened the foundation of the building making it crumble. It was an old building after all. This is negligence when they allowed people to live in that building while, working on it. The work on it probably, extensive enough to cause the structure to fail. Engineers will tell you that their priority when constructing a building is to make it strong enough that it does not collapse to the lower floors. Yet, that happened in this case. More likely, the result of that construction work they were doing in that building.
Sorry... It was very clear that we didn't know anything via the statement "I have no knowledge" and the article was very clear that the engineers are investigating what had happened considering a report in 2018 by an someone (an engineer) that stated there was major structural damage or concerns about the building in 2018... ---------- Engineer flagged 'concrete deterioration' A newly released 2018 report showed that an engineer found evidence of major structural damage beneath the pool deck and "concrete deterioration" in the underground parking garage of the condominium tower near Miami Beach, three years before it collapsed Thursday. ---------- wrbtrader